In a previous
article, I tackled a key word for understanding
the topic of atonement: "justification." This article
seeks to clarify the actual word "atonement" itself. In
Romans 5:11, many translations use either the word
"reconciliation" or "atonement." I hope to show that
Scripture does not support the mainstream Protestant
understand of the word "atonement."

DEFINING
ATONEMENT

Scripture presents mankind as separated from God by sin.
"Atonement" refers to the reunion of humans to God and
the means by which the problem of human sin is resolved
for such a reunion. The 1913 "International
Standard Bible Encyclopedia" clarified a
serious deficiency in how English Bibles use the word
"atonement":

Not only was no effort made to convey the
original Hebrew and Greek meanings by means of
English words, but no effort was made toward
uniformity in translating of Hebrew and Greek
words by their English equivalents.

The ISBE warned that the word "atonement" does not
reflect the Greek word for which it was substituted. The
Greek word underlying "atonement" is katallasso,
meaning "to change in an establishing manner."

kata
is a very common preposition meaning "down" or
"against." When employed as a verb prefix, kata
indicates that the verb establishes
something, as in kathisteimi
which Paul used a few verses later in Romans 5:19.

Church
Tradition agrees with Scripture that Jesus atoned
us to God by changing us through His incarnation, death,
and resurrection. Protestant Tradition says that we were
atoned to God not by changing us, but by changing God's
need for justice - by fulfilling the need for justice.
All Christians agree that Jesus died
for our sins. All Christians agree that He suffered on
behalf of humans, but Protestants alone claim that Jesus
fixed God's need for justice instead of fixing us.
Scripture never states that Jesus satisfied God's need
to judiciously penalize humans. Neither does Scripture
ever state that Jesus satisfied God's wrath. Both of
those ideas come from Protestant logic, not from
Scripture.

Both of
those ideas come from Protestant logic, not from
Scripture.

PROTESTANT
TRADITION

In the 11th century AD, a Roman Catholic named Anselm
offered the idea that Jesus' life and death satisfied
the collective debt of honor which we owed God due to
our having dishonored Him in our sins. In the 13th
century AD, Thomas Aquinas (also Roman Catholic) tied
Anselm's idea of human debt to punishment
and "penance." There are four branches of
Christianity which stretch back to the apostles
themselves, and Roman Catholicism is the only one of
those four branches which views atonement through the
lense of debt-fulfillment.

Protestantism (the fifth branch of Christianity) then
added to the Roman Catholic idea of debt-atonement. The
Reformers said that God required the satisfaction of His
wrath and required the satisfaction of justice. Roman
Catholics only saw an honor debt and a penance debt in
humans, believing that humans could not be healed from
sin without the fulfillment of those debts. Protestants
added both a wrath debt and a justice debt on top of the
honor debt and the penance debt. The Reformers invented
the idea that God satisfied His need for wrath and
justice by punishing His Son. Neither Scripture, nor the
first fifteen centuries of Christianity said such
things. The Reformers claimed Sola Scriptura,
but they invented the wrathful divine punishment of
Jesus by Sola Philosophy.

The
Reformers claimed Sola Scriptura,
but they invented the wrathful and divine
punishment of Jesus from Sola Philosophy.

If Protestants are right, then we should wonder why
Scripture does not clearly state such things. Moreover,
we must wonder whether Christianity ever existed before
the Protestant Reformation. If all of Christianity had
been wrong about the atonement all around the world for
fifteen centuries, then did Christianity really exist?
Was there any true Christianity left after all those
centuries for the Reformers to reform?

ATONEMENT
BY TRANSFORMATION

Jesus atoned us to God by fixing us, not by fixing God.
Yet we have a hard time defining the mechanics of how He
changed us. We also find it hard to explain the Trinity,
but that does not mean that Scripture and Tradition are
not consistent about it. We have a hard time explaining
the incarnation of the God's Word in human flesh, but
Scripture and Tradition are consistent about the fact
that it happened. Likewise, the difficulty of explaining
our atonement by transformation does not change the fact
that Scripture and Tradition have been consistent on the
topic.

Adam
transformed humanity into rebels at the beginning of our
species. Only a human could change humanity into rebels.
Adam was that human (Romans 5:12-21). Moreover, only the
origin of the human race could change humanity. Adam was
that origin (Romans 5:12-21). So long as Adam was the
only human origin of the entire human race, no hope
remained. But in the fullness of time, the divine Origin
of the human race became human.

In the
fullness of time, the divine Origin of
humanity became human.

In the fullness of time, the "Last Adam" (1Cor 15:45-48)
joined Himself to us, taking our nature so that we could
be joined to Him and become "partakers of the divine
nature" (2Pet 1:4). Rising from the dead, Jesus offered
His Spirit to all who would be healed of their Adamic
nature. We were destined for God's wrath because of what
we did, and we did what we did because of what the first
Adam made us.

The problem was
not God's wrath, but our rebellious Adamic nature.
God's wrath did not need to be resolved. We needed to
be resolved. We were "sons of disobedience" (Eph 2:2,
Eph 5:6, Col 3:6). Scripture calls the citizens of
King Jesus the sons of God, sons of light, sons of
day, sons of the kingdom, sons of the Most High, and
"sons of the resurrection" (Luke 20:36). I cannot
explain it, but somehow the resurrection of King Jesus
made the second birth possible for us. Reformed
theology claims there is only one people of God, but
the first people of God were never offered the option
to be twice-born. Something brand new and mysterious
happened in the incarnation, death, and resurrection
of God's eternal Word!

We were born
Adam-ian and reborn Christ-ian. Therefore the King of
Kings declared, "Truly truly I say to you, if someone is
not generated out of water and Spirit, he is not able to
come into the kingdom of the God." We must submit to the
authority of King Jesus and be baptized into His name.
All who do so are katallasso; that is to say,
they are atoned to God by being transformed from
rebellious to righteous through their union to the
Righteous One, just as Paul wrote in Romans 5:19...

"For
just as the many were made sinners
through the rebellion of the one man,
likewise also the many are made righteous
through the obedience of the one."

Only a human could
change humans, and only the origin of humans could
change humans. Therefore only Adam could change humans
prior to Jesus because only Adam was both our human
origin. The Origin of humanity became human to become
the greater Adam, changing His offspring just as Adam
changed his offspring. The Masoretic Hebrew of Isaiah
53:10 says of our King's suffering, "He will see His
seed."